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Susan Whitfield

(IDP), founded in 1994, a collaboration among libraries, museums, and research institutes worldwide to conserve, catalogue, digitize and research archeological artifacts, manuscripts, and archives relating to the archeological sites of Central Asia during the period of the ‘Silk Road.’

Steven C. Anderson

IN IRAN, AFGHANISTAN, AND NEIGHBORING CENTRAL ASIA. This category includes all animals without a vertebral column. Thus it is a term of convenience that, though widely used, has little biological meaning.

E. Badian

the unsuccessful uprising of the Greek cities of Asia Minor against Achaemenid control, 499-493 BCE. The main and almost the only source for the Revolt is Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The revolt of the Ionians and of some Aeolians joining them had clearly not been a spontaneous rising. Dislike of Persian rule does seem, at this time, to have been universal among the western subjects.

Gen'ichi Tsuge

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Annemarie Schimmel

spiritual father of Pakistan and leading Persian and Urdu poet of India in the first half of the 20th century (1877-1938). He was well versed in the various fields of European philosophy and thought. He was equally well read in the Eastern tradition, and special mention should be made of his analysis of Persian thought in his thesis of 1907.

A. Shapur Shahbazi

Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari

, JALĀL-AL-MAMĀLEK, a major Persian poet and satirist of the early 20th century and one of the most popular poets of the late Qajar period (1874-1926). His intimate, idiomatic mode of expression and almost conversational tone initiated an entirely new trend in Persian poetry, which some critics have referred to as “the journalistic style.”

Multiple Authors

The following sub-entries will provide an overview of the unifying factors which constitute Iran through time and across space, while also showing the complexity and heterogeneity of the components of Iranian culture.

Xavier de Planhol

Ehsan Yarshater

This section provides a concise introduction to the history of Iran from its beginnings to modern times. The generally recognized periods of the country’s history are reviewed, and some of the major motifs or themes in the politics or culture of the various periods are discussed.

Ehsan Yarshater

Iran in the Islamic Period (651-1980s). This section of Persian history begins with the conquest by Muslim Arabs and the introduction of Islam to Persia, the gradual conversion of the Persians to the faith of the conquerors, and some 200 years of Arab rule.

Ehsan Yarshater

Ehsan Yarshater

The Qajar dynasty (1779-1924). The Qajar were a Turkmen tribe who first settled during the Mongol period in the vicinity of Armenia and were among the seven Qezelbāš tribes that supported the Safavids.

John R. Hinnells

In the study of religion, myths are seen as narratives which encapsulate fundamental truths about the nature of existence, god(s), God(s), the universe. They explain the origin of the world or of a tribe or of a ritual.

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Prods Oktor Skjærvø

The term “Iranian language” is applied to any language which is descended from a proto-Iranian parent language (unattested by texts) spoken, presumably, in Central Asia in the late 3rd to early 2nd millennium BCE.

Gernot Windfuhr

This entry will discuss the non-Iranian languages spoken in Iran in the course of its history as the result of various peoples settling in parts of Iran and interacting with Iranian-speaking peoples who began to migrate to Iranian territories at the beginning of second millennium BCE. The entry includes linguistic sketches of languages or dialects.

Gernot Windfuhr

Speakers of North-Eastern Aramaic have been in contact with Iranian languages in the western regions of the plateau and on the western side of the Zagros for some 3,000 years -- with Jewish settlement from Mesopotamia documented since the eighth century BCE, Christian emigration begun during the Parthian period, and the Mandaeans, settled in southeastern Mesopotamia and adjacent Khuzestan by the 3rd century CE.

Philip Huyse

CHARLES-HENRI DE FOUCHÉCOUR

We will pay special attention to the early formation and origins of different literary genres in Persian works, even though the very notion of literary genres is somewhat arbitrary and a subject of continuing debate.

Philip G. Kreyenbroek

Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst and Philip G. Kreyenbroek

Called after the founding prophet Mani (216-74 or 277), Manicheism was a syncretistic religion that, combining elements of the various religions current in Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau at the time, claimed to be the ultimate religion.